Garden Scissors

Photo by Rick Gush I can’t live without my garden scissors! Usually when I wax poetic about by my garden tools, I’m talking about sturdy, blacksmith-made shovels, picks and trowels that I can get here in Italy. Today, however, I’m going to laud one of my seldom-mentioned but often-used garden tools: my scissors. Many other […]

Usually when I wax poetic about by my garden tools, I’m talking about sturdy, blacksmith-made shovels, picks and trowels that I can get here in Italy. Today, however, I’m going to laud one of my seldom-mentioned but often-used garden tools: my scissors.

Many other garden tools can be used instead, but scissors are safer. My hands have several little scars from my garden knives gone awry and a few big scars from my pruning shears, but I have absolutely no scars from my scissors. Garden scissors are also very inexpensive. I paid 32 euros for my latest pair of garden shears, but I only paid 1 euro for my pair of scissors.

Garden scissors are really good for harvesting lettuce and other soft things that need to be cut. With my garden scissors, I can easily cut a head of lettuce, cut squash off the vine or harvest herbs, such as marjoram and sage. Scissors are also great for harvesting flowers. I cut a small bouquet of roses with my scissors yesterday.

A pair of garden scissors is obviously a good tool for cutting twine and twist ties. I use a lot of green, plastic-covered wire to tie up plants in the garden and wrap bunches of herbs and flowers. I used the scissors to cut the twist-tie for supporting the peas yesterday, and I used the scissors for cutting ties for a bunch of herbs that I harvested today.

Scissors are, of course, a great tool for cutting stuff like plastic sheeting and shade cloth. It rained hard a few days ago, so I used my scissors the day before yesterday to cut up some old plastic cement bags to make protective wrapping for a half sack of special cement that came in a paper sack.

Scissors are good for poking holes in shade cloth to allow cord to be attached, and they are also good for opening cardboard boxes of snail meal and opening sacks of concrete. Scissors are also good for light pruning in the garden, and I use them almost every day to keep my rambunctious start jasmine trellis looking nicely trimmed. Back when I had a lot of bonsai plants, I had a whole suite of expensive Japanese shears, but the pruning tool I used most often was my regular pair of scissors.

Perhaps the best but least-frequent use of scissors in the garden is for thinning seedlings. I have great trouble seeding sparsely, so everything from radishes to carrots and peas tend to germinate and become a bit crowded in my garden, and none of those do well unless the plants are spaced properly. So, I need to do a lot of seedling thinning.

In my youth, I used to pinch the seedlings with my fingers or pull out the unwanted baby plants, but pulling out seedlings often causes root damage to neighbor seedlings, whose roots are intertwined with the seedlings being removed. Once I discovered using scissors for thinning seedlings, I never went back to the other method.

Rick Gush has been fascinated with growing plants since he had his first little garden of marigolds and yellow pear tomatoes when he was 6 years old in California. He is now more than 10 times that age, and has in the meanwhile has become a professional garden expert. He almost cries with happiness every time he grows marigolds and yellow pear tomatoes in his cliff-hanging garden on the steep coastline of Liguria, Italy.MORE ARTICLES